"It always seemed to me," the soft contralto was murmuring once more, "that writers and artists should never be viewed at close range. They're like sugar; they should be left to sweeten life, without being put under the microscope, to show all their poor little writhing realities. So in one way it's just as well that we two _will_ never know each other when next we meet." He felt certain, as she ended with her warm little laugh, that she was looking up at him through the darkness, and he vehemently asked himself if she was still making fun of him. "I wonder if we two _will_ know each other again?" "I want to, so much!" said Hartley. He was very human. "Then you may interview me," she said gaily, infecting him with the sudden romance of the situation. "Then you can tear me to pieces afterward." And they both laughed youthfully as he told her of his last assignment, a request to demand five of New York's most eminent men to draw a pig with their eyes shut, for an illustrated page of the United News Bureau. They grew serious once more, and he asked if there was nothing in which he _could_ help her. "Couldn't I, in any way?" he begged, the darkness helping him out. "Would you?" she said, quite gravely now, leaning imperceptibly closer to him in the muffling twilight. Her flash of woman's intuition had not misled her; there was much about him that she liked. "Won't you let me?" he asked again even more earnestly. He was still half afraid it was all mere play, but his artistic soul's sense of dramatic values chained him to the part. "Yes," she said simply, "I will." Her voice carried with it a timorous and tacit something, a something which flashed over the heads of a hundred dancing maskers in the hall of the Capulets when a young Montague first met the glance of his Juliet. They shook hands in parting, and brief as that hand-clasp was, it appeared portentous to both of them. To Hartley himself it seemed almost as if his fingers had pressed the hidden button of an incandescent light, for, at the moment, he noticed the fleeting, half-phosphorescent luminousness of the other's eyes, even through the dusk that clung about them and divided them. Then the young woman gathered up her rustling yellow skirts and hurried down the ladder to join the others, taking themselves off by twos and threes. CHAPTER II THE SPIRIT OF THE CITY All clad in mail he rode for Christ, And his strait pathway trod; Nor scorned he to be sacrificed For his most jealous God. JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight." Our Manhattans of the mind always have their Boweries of the blood.--"The Silver Poppy." "Wonderful, isn't it?" cried Hartley, leaning out of the wide-silled studio window where Repellier sat smoking wearily. He sniffed eagerly at the warm night air, with its mingled odors of asphalt and dust and cooling masonry.